Since school has started up, we’ve been hesitant to continue with the family game night. But you just can’t keep us down. We’ve decided to alternate Jaws of the Lion, a campaign game, with other games. Last time we met it was for mahjong. Tonight, we’re back in Gloomhaven.
My goal with Jaws of the Lion was to completely 3D print the terrain, the miniatures, the furniture — everything. Unfortunately, I’ve been having a lot of trouble with the 3D printer, but that’s really a story for another post. Because of the problems, I haven’t been able to finish printing the wooden floors for this scenario, or the stone floors for the next one. I have a barrel full of failed prints. Something about the floor tiles for wood and stone really seems to kill my printer.
So that was issue #1. Issue #2 was the miniatures. My boyfriend had printed them, but I still had a lot of painting to do. I’d thought, somehow, that the scenario we were playing tonight was just Vermlings, and I’d painted those already. While setting the game up, though, I saw that we were actually facing zealots and snakes.
Since both my kids have pet snakes, painting the snake miniatures to look like their snakes was a priority 🙂 I only got to one of them, my son’s California King snake, Shaharra. I’ll have my daughter’s snake, Hydra, for next time. I had done a couple of snakes with random patterns, so those were going to be on the board.
I hadn’t painted any of the zealots, though. As soon as work ended, I took out my paints and got to painting. I only finished two of them, though, before my daughter came over. Those two had to leapfrog through the scenario, taking the place of an unpainted one every time they died.
Since I hadn’t gotten the terrain printed, we had to use the Jaws of the Lion scenario book as it was intended, though with my printed terrain pieces. To be honest, not having to fiddle with all those Maghex bases and the terrain tiles saved a lot of time. I’m rethinking printing the bases at the moment. Printed hexes can look good, but I’m not sure I can make them look better than the printed page.
The game is still leading us through the tutorial — when we finished the scenario (which was easy; we should have chosen a higher difficulty), we were given the rest of our level 1 cards, as well as the ability to gain experience and a free perk.
The scenario lent itself to exploring our new powers. The Hatchet sent his favorite axe flying; the Demolitionist blew things up; the Red Guard set up combos; and my Voidwarden just stood in the back cleaning things up because I only had one useful movement card. I’ll have more for the next scenario.
Since the next scenario (speaking of…) is so long, we opted to quit early tonight, rather than get into something that was going to take a significant amount of time.
Next time, we’re thinking Kingdom Death, mahjong, or Terraforming Mars. If we do Terraforming Mars, I’m going to strip it down to just the base game and the Turmoil expansion so we can really focus in on the Turmoil events.
